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Leading Australian newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald says Australian sanctions against Fiji may not be having any success because of the country’s buoyant tourism industry and aid from China.
The newspaper reports that apart from apathy from superpowers such as the United States, whose president Barack Obama was declared the first Pacific president of the US, the seeming indifference of Fijians to their own situation puts a question mark over the Rudd government's pro-democracy rhetoric and its sanctions on Fiji.
“Canberra's sanctions are intended to hurt the regime, not the people of Fiji who receive Australian aid worth about $27 million last year,” the SMH reports.
“On the urging of Australia and New Zealand, Fiji's membership of the South Pacific Forum and the Commonwealth has been suspended.”
“But its rhetoric and its diplomatic efforts to squeeze further have failed. Australian tourism to Fiji is surging; China is maintaining its aid program, despite representations from Canberra; and the United Nations ignored Canberra's appeals for it to cease using Fijian troops in its peace-keeping operations around the world.”
"They are not isolated," the newspaper quotes a Western diplomat as saying. "There are no trade sanctions and they still have economic ties in the region. The EU was willing to meet Bainimarama last month and an IMF team is in town this (last) week."
The Herald concludes there is a consensus among both local critics and supporters of the government, and among foreign diplomats, that international pressure will not make Bainimarama change his policies or his timetable.
The report quotes Fiji Times Editor Netani Rika as saying that Canberra is ''pissing in the wind''.
Rika is quoted as saying Australia and New Zealand might have been more successful had they done more earlier to ensure that Fijians understood the difference between democracy "and the form of government we have had for the last 40 years".
"It's one thing to jump up and down now, but Canberra's silence about the failings of the notionally democratic governments we have had is a sign of its complicity in the problems we face," Rika said.
